The Other Side of Midnight (18 page)

Some taxi drivers are hooked on them, big time. They'll come out at five or six o'clock in the morning. By the time twelve o'clock rolls around and they've made $200, they're gone then to sit in front of a machine. They'll be on the road then until six or seven o'clock in the evening trying to make a shift. If they can't they'll come to someone like me who owns his own car and say, “Any chance you can loan me a shift? I haven't got a drop of gas to put in the car.” If you need to put a bit of bread on your table, I got no problem giving it to you. I'll give you the shirt off my back as long as I think you need it. But I'm not giving you 5 cents to help feed your habit. It doesn't work that way.

Last year, one of our drivers was going to beat me up. Me and him were on the same car. I worked days, and he worked nights. He was hooked on the VLTs. I'd get the car off him, check the gas and check the oil to make sure she was topped up. Just about every day she'd be down five, or six, or seven dollars' worth of gas and down a half-quarter of oil. That's coming out of my pocket. If I got to spend ten bucks a day, that's fifty bucks a week. That's $200 a month. That's over two grand a year.

Every morning I passed in the receipts and the boss would go to him for whatever it was he owed him. At the time, the car wasn't mine. The company owned it. Eventually, he got fed up and told the boss he was going to punch me in the mouth. “He's more than welcome to try,” I said.

I was at Petro Canada on Topsail Road, and the manager said, “Frank, he's going to flatten you.”

I wasn't leaving that alone. I walked over to his car and said, “Do you have a problem?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You're an asshole.”

“Everyone is entitled to their opinion,” I said. “But you know about opinions. They're like assholes: everyone's got one, and they all stink.”

“I'm going to punch you in the mouth,” he said.

“Before you do that, my son, let me give you a piece of advice. If it doesn't work out to your advantage, you're going to be one sorry son of a bitch. Let's get that straight before this goes any further. Are you still ready to rumble?”

“Oh, yes,” he said.

He got out of the cab, and I bet the shit out of him right there in the Petro Canada parking lot.

The next day, I got a call from the police. “This gentleman you had a fight with yesterday wants you charged with assault causing bodily harm. He's got a few nice marks on him.”

I had to get a lawyer. “I'm not pleading guilty,” I said. “I had a fight with him, yes, but he asked for it. Besides, the gas station got the whole thing on video.”

In court, the judge said, “Sir, you want to be wary of who you associate with.”

I said, “Listen, I know who I associate with, and I try my best to stay clear of them, but it just didn't work out that way. This is not like any other job. Sometimes you're put in situations you don't really want to be in, but which you can't get out of. You got to stand up for yourself and do what you do best.”

I ended up with an unconditional discharge.

I talked to the prosecutor out by the courthouse. As luck would have it, me and him used to get on the beer together at the university. “You know, this isn't the only time this is going to happen. I'm a cab driver. The same people the police cart off on a Friday and Saturday night, some of them slip through the cracks, and I get them. I don't have a nine millimetre. I can call for backup, sure, but it might take ten or fifteen minutes before anyone gets there. By then I'd be dead on the sidewalk. I got to be the way I am in order to survive.”

My wife has asked me when I'm going to stop fighting.

“When I get out of the taxiing racket,” I told her.

Getting Set Up

Darryl, driving and dispatching for forty years

As I get older, I'm not so familiar with faces, which is kind of strange, which is kind of opposite. People usually remember faces, but I remember voices. I can be at the shop or at a bar, and I'll recognize the voice of the person talking behind me.
I know that voice,
I know that voice.
Even now, years after I gave up dispatching, I can usually put a voice to an address, or a voice to a particular run. I might not remember what some drivers look like, even the ones I worked with for years, but I'll never forget a voice over the radio.

Wherever the dispatcher sent me, as soon as the customer said where they were going, I instantly recognized them. I knew who they were and what their morning routine was.

My voice might register with them then, too. “Do I know you?”

“I never drove you before, missus, but I'm sure I've taken your calls.”

They were almost always glad to put a face to that voice.

Over twenty-five years, I learned to trust voices.

I picked up a guy downtown. “Where are you going, my buddy?” I asked.

“Take me to the Topsail Road entrance of Donovon's.”

If you're any bit personable, you try to make some sort of small talk with your customer. You might start off with the weather, for instance, but by the time you get to where you're going you're probably after talking about politics and religion and everything in between. With this guy, I never got a gig.

I tried feeling him out: “Not a bad night.”

Nothing. I couldn't get a thing out of him. It's pretty strange when someone doesn't have at least something to say to you, especially on a long trip like that.

One thing kept going through my mind:
I'm getting set up to be
robbed
.

Nobody likes to get robbed, whether it's a $5 fare or a $50 fare, because whatever they get comes straight out of your own pocket. It's a double-whammy. You got to pay for the shift and then you never earned any money for that night. Even worse, you could get stabbed or beaten. Today, if you're going out over the highway you want to get paid up front. If the driver is cute about it he'll drop his money off at a secure location in town, like a gas station.

We were getting pretty close to where he wanted to get dropped off, and I saw the cops coming towards me on the opposite side of the road. At the time, I was driving a Crown Victoria, one of those old RCMP police packages. I flicked the headlights, and they pulled me in.

“Holy Jesus,” I said. “The cops just pulled me in.”

Still nothing out of him.

I got out and headed back to the cop car. “I don't know what's on the go with this customer,” I explained. “He hasn't spoken to me since he got in the car. I think I'm getting set up.”

One of the cops got out, talked to buddy and asked him for some identification. Everything seemed fine.

With them tailing us, I drove him to a kind of small nondescript office building. The parking lot was deserted. I never stuck around to see if he went in.

As I pulled out, I noticed the cops were stopped across the road, watching.

That customer might not have meant any harm, but something didn't feel right. I never thought too much of it afterwards, but I often wondered what would've happened if the cops had never shown up.

Just Out of Dorchester

Dave, driving for twenty-two years

They sent me on a call to a fairly decent area of town, a fairly decent neighbourhood. A guy came out with a bottle of rum in his hand. He had a big, long, red beard and, to me, looked like something out of a lumberjack camp.

I said, “Where are you going to?”

“Whitbourne.”

I said, “Have you got the money?” You always look for the money up front.

He showed me he had a handful of twenties. He said, “Do you mind if I drink this bottle?”

“No, go right ahead.”

On the way out, we had a little chat, and he said, “I just got out of jail in Dorchester. I did six years for manslaughter.”

I thought,
Jesus, great!

I pulled up in front of his house and there was a big party on the go inside. There were cars everywhere. I didn't know if it was a welcome home party for him, or what was on the go. By this time, he was asleep, and I had to wake him up. He looked around: “Where am I?”

“You're home. This is your house. This is where you told me to take you to.”

He said, “What is on the go here?”

He ran out of the taxi and into the house. Honest to God, there were people jumping out of the windows. He was in there going mad; he was like a lunatic. I could hear pots and pans and glasses smashing.

“Jesus,” I said, “I got to try to go in and get paid by this guy.”

I went up and everybody was running out to their cars taking off. It was like a bomb had gone off in there. It was like something you'd see on
The Simpsons
. I knocked on the door and went in and looked around. He had his wife up in the corner like that. [
Makes a
strangling motion.
] “You whore. You slut.” He was screaming all kinds of old stuff.

“Buddy,” I said, “you owe me eighty bucks.”

“I'm not paying you.”

I said, “Listen, man. You just got out of Dorchester doing time for manslaughter. I know you're on some kind of undertaking. You don't want me to get the cops. The police are only down the road.”

And with that he made a run at me. Like I said, he was pretty drunk by this time, and there wasn't much to him. I just flipped him over my hip and got him to the floor. I said to missus, “Missus, come over. He's got money in that pocket there. Take out the eighty bucks he owes me, and I'll go get the police.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “We'll work it out.”

A Sobeys Bag Full of Beer

Gordon, driving for eighteen years

There was a guy walking around downtown with a big beer gut and his shirt off. He had a trench knife, the kind with the brass knuckles on the handle. They're illegal. A customer I had in the back told me to watch out for him. Just as he said that, I drove by the guy, and he went up George Street towards Trapper John's. I thought to myself,
I got to see what this is all about
. When I got around to the back of Trapper John's, the police had him surrounded. Three guys were wiping blood off themselves with a T-shirt, and one of them had the tip of his nose cut off. His friends tried to help him, and they got slashed and cut and were bleeding all over the place.

Knives aren't uncommon. I've had knives pulled on me. It's funny because I teach knife fighting. About ten years ago, I had a butterfly knife. It was a Filipino Balisong. They sometimes call it a “Manila folder.” I was practicing tricks while there was nothing doing, and I got a call. I picked up this young guy. “What would you do if somebody pulled a knife on you?” he said.

“What kind of knife?”

He reached into his jacket and pulled one out. It was a little switchblade kind of job.

“I'd just take this out,” I said, took out my knife and started doing some tricks.

“Oh, that's a nice one.” He put his knife back in his pocket, and any intention he had of robbing me was gone out the window.

But knives aren't the only thing I've had to contend with. About four years ago, I picked up three guys on Richmond Hill who were wasted on cocaine. This was about four o'clock in the morning. They wouldn't give me a destination—just directions. Most cab drivers don't like that: it makes them uneasy. “Why don't you tell me where you're going?”

After a while, he said, “We're going straight now. We're done with the turns.”

We went right up to Bay Bulls, and one of them started laughing. “We're going to rob you now.”

I locked her up and jumped out. “Well, let's go. There's only three of you. I can handle that.”

“Never mind him. He's an asshole,” his buddy said.

One Friday night, I was in the car waiting for some guy for about ten minutes. This was just off Golf Avenue, there by Buckmaster Circle. I could hear him bawling at me from the steps: “You haven't got that cash register on have you?”

“No, but I've been waiting a while. How about getting in?”

“I'm going back in the house for a piss,” he said.

“All right, if you're doing that, I'm going to have to turn the meter on.”

He came down from the steps and started calling me every name under the sun.

“Listen,” I said, “are you going somewhere? Where are you headed to?”

He had a Sobeys bag full of beer, five or six bottles of beer. “I got a good mind to smack you right in the conk,” he said.

“If you think you can get away with it, be my guest.”

So he hauled off with the bag of beer. I struck him with a right jab, and he lunged at me and tried to tear my ear off. I had all kinds of scratches on the side of my face, and there was blood. I grabbed him and lifted up his eyelid with my index finger and shoved my thumb against his eye. “That's what it's going to cost you,” I said. As soon as I let go with my hands, he lunged at me again. I got him with an elbow and bounced his head off the windshield. Then his friend came out and tried to help him. He dove over him and pinned my hands beneath me. I tried to head-butt him and get my hands free. His buddy then took him by the hand: “Let's get out of here!”

“Yeah, get him out before I call the cops,” I said.

“Go ahead,” he said, “you call the cops. I saw it. You hit him first.”

It was that or get the face cut off me with a bag of beer.

“Get your beer,” his buddy said.

I knew what he was going to do. He faked like he was getting the beer and dove at me. I grabbed him by the hair and gave him another three quick ones. The next thing, about ten of them came running out of the house. I managed to get the car moving, but she wouldn't do much because the timing chain was broke. I coasted down over the hill—no brakes, no power steering—and got to Rickett's Road and radioed in: “Send me another cab and a tow truck.”